Laura Stricker

Adam Kelly has been losing himself in the mind of a killer for six years.
“I’m pushing a lot of shit down without expressing it,” he said. “By the end of the show I’m usually quite a mess.”
Kelly’s one-man show, The Anorak, is a 90-minute production about the life and death of École Polytechnique murderer Marc Lépine, who went on a shooting rampage on Dec. 6, 1989, at the Montreal school, killing 14 women and leaving 10 women and four men wounded.
Kelly, a Montreal native, is seen immersing himself in Lépine’s sinister state of mind, which he finds to be powerful and consuming.
“I’m preparing to get into the mindset and the emotional frame of someone who doesn’t express very much and keeps a lot of stuff in. I tend to be the opposite,” he said.
“In a situation where something has stricken me and is kind of hard, I’m probably going to cry, whereas someone like Lépine probably wouldn’t.
“A lot of my preparation is just imagining situations where I might be upset and instead of wanting to cry about it, (I keep) it in.”
The Anorak came to Ryerson last week in time for International Women’s Day on March 8. Unfortunately a stroke of bad luck left Kelly without an audience to entertain, as two of the three shows he was set to
perform were cancelled because of poor turnout and a massive snowstorm.
Despite the misfortune that plagued the Ryerson shows, The Anorak has been performed to rave reviews at York University, Queen’s University and Concordia University, among many other schools and theatres.
Kelly was studying fine arts and acting at York when he was assigned to write a solo show that had to touch on personal issues, and that’s when he came up with the concept for The Anorak.
“I wrote a show that was mainly focused on events of my life . . . one of the things I ended up talking about was the Polytechnique massacre,” he said.
Initially the show did not feature Lépine as a character. But Kelly, who grew up in the same town as the disturbed killer, eventually developed what he called “the schizophrenic show,” where he would switch back and forth between playing himself and Lépine. He didn’t like it.
“I didn’t enjoy performing the stuff about me,” he said. “The stuff about the killer was much more powerful and resonated with me.”
Kelly reworked the show and performed the updated version for the first time in 2002 after hearing from a colleague that the material about Lépine was much more interesting.
Other friends are more concerned for his mental well-being.
“I actually had (another) colleague say to me, ‘I’m afraid for you. I don’t think you should be doing this to yourself.’
“My response to her was, ‘That’s my job.’I bought into this crazy career several years ago. I think actors’ jobs are to get up there and go through the things we generally don’t want to go through as human beings.”
Although Kelly has been in character as Lépine for six years, he said he is no closer to understanding why school shootings happen.
“I get calls all the time when there is a new school shooting. It’s always a similar kind of story and the fact that it’s happening in schools too — what does that represent?
“Why are so many people targeting schools as the subject of their oppression? What’s going on with the school system? I don’t have the answers.”
When asked if he finds playing Lépine difficult, Kelly answered yes without hesitation.
Despite the difficult subject matter, Kelly said he does not plan to give up the role of Lépine and hopes to bring the play to New York, where he is moving shortly, by the end of the year.
When Kelly isn’t busy getting into the mind of a murderer, he is part of a comedy troupe in Montreal called the Dancing Cock Brothers, which he said is similar to Kids in the Hall and Monty Python.
He is also working on his next play, a sex comedy about a man looking for his ideal woman.
In addition he is collaborating on a French language film about the Montreal massacre. It is
being filmed in Montreal, and the director and producer hope to have it completed in time for the
2008 Toronto International Film Festival.